Pizza, Weddings, and Murder (Papa Pacelli's Pizzeria Series Book 23)

by Patti Benning

  The cream inside was a bright, toxic green color, and smelled more strongly of chemicals than she had expected. The pamphlet she had picked up on her way into the salon had promised an all-natural facial treatment. She didn’t see how something that green could be all natural. Even the technician seemed hesitant. She was looking down at the bowl with a frown on her face.

  “This isn’t right,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Ellie straightened up and looked around. Her mother was already leaning back with her eyes closed, and the mask on her face was a much lighter, pale green — nothing like the almost neon cream in Ellie’s bowl.

  “It’s the wrong color, but I don’t see how it could be. We mixed everything as one batch, then separated it out. All the different bowls should be exactly the same. I’m going to bring this to my boss and I’ll get you a new bowl.”

  Puzzled, Ellie leaned back, looking around the room as she did so. Everyone else had their face masks on by now, and they were all the same pale green as the one Ellie had seen them applying to her mother.

  The technician returned a moment later, and this time the face cream in the bowl was the same color as everyone else’s and smelled like herbs instead of chemicals. Ellie leaned back, still puzzling over what had happened as she closed her eyes and let the technician apply the cream to her face.

  By the time everyone’s treatment was finished, and their faces had been washed, Ellie felt like a brand-new person. Her nails were perfect — she had chosen a pale, translucent pearly white color with just a tinge of blue. She had reluctantly foregone the gel tips, because she didn’t want to worry about keeping up with fake nails during her honeymoon. Her face felt fresh and clean, and ten years younger. She was wedding ready, besides her hair and makeup which would be done Saturday morning.

  She waited with the others at the cash register, while her mother — who had insisted on paying — took care of the bill. When she saw the woman who had done her hair, nails, and face walk through with a stack of towels, she peeled off from her group and approached her.

  “Did you find out what went wrong with that first batch of face cream?” she asked. “I know the next one was fine, but I’m still curious.”

  The woman hesitated, glancing over at her boss who was still ringing them up. “We have no idea how it happened,” she said, keeping her voice barely above a whisper. “But somehow, green hair dye got mixed in with the face cream. It must have been one of the new girls, playing some sort of practical joke. My boss doesn’t want it spread around — business has already been worse than usual this year. I promise, once we figure out who did it, she’ll be fired. If it hadn’t been caught in time, you might have had to walk down the aisle with a green face.”

  The technician hurried on her way, leaving Ellie too stunned to say anything as she rejoined her group. Had someone at the nail salon tried to sabotage her wedding?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  After they got back to the house, Rachel, Katia, Darlene, and Ellie’s mother took just a few minutes to get changed and grab some coffee before the four of them left again, this time to meet Shannon at the community center where they would set everything up for the wedding on Saturday.

  Ellie was glad for the alone time with her grandmother. The two of them sat down in their usual spots at the kitchen table, Ellie with a cup of coffee and Nonna with a mug of tea. A plate of blueberry muffins that the older woman had made fresh that morning sat between them, and Sawyer and Bunny sat near their feet, looking up hopefully as Ellie grabbed a muffin.

  “That was lovely,” Nonna said. “It was nice of your friends to plan all of that for you.”

  “It was quite nice, besides the fact that my face almost turned green.”

  At her grandmother’s puzzled look, Ellie dove in to her story about the dye that had been mixed in with the face mask cream. “I didn’t make a big deal about it because it was caught in time, but can you imagine walking down the aisle with a green face? I don’t know if I could do it. I might have had to postpone the wedding.”

  “That would have been a disaster,” her grandmother said. “Between this and the poor girl that got killed during your bachelorette party, things haven’t been going all that smoothly for you, have they?”

  Ellie shook her head. “Hopefully nothing else happens before the wedding. I’m stressed enough as it is. I keep alternating between being giddy and excited, and terrified. Is that normal?”

  “It is most definitely normal,” her grandmother assured her. “You’ll be just fine, dear. Russell loves you, and that wouldn’t change even if you walked down the aisle with a green face.”

  She smiled faintly, grateful to her grandmother for her reassurances, but distracted by a thought that had just occurred to her. She had convinced herself that Russell’s suspicion about her being the real target of the attack had been nothing more than a fantasy, but what if it hadn’t been? The dye in the face cream wasn’t the same as a deadly attack, but it could have been another attempt to sabotage their wedding.

  Now I’m the one who’s being paranoid, she thought, but she excused herself from the table and took her cell phone into the other room, nonetheless. Russell would want to know about this.

  Her fiancé answered her call with a cheerful tone, but by the time she finished with her story, she could tell that his good mood was gone. “Walk me through it again,” he said. “What happened just before the incident with the face cream?”

  “Well, I think someone tried to come in and book an appointment, but it sounded like they were told to leave. I’m not sure that’s what happened, but I could hear arguing voices including one that sounded like my mom’s voice. I didn’t get a chance to ask her about it — she’s with the others right now, setting up the reception hall.”

  “You don’t have any idea who it was that came in?”

  “No,” she said. “I stayed in my chair in the back room the whole time.”

  “If you can get a description, then I could cross reference it with the witnesses at the bar and see if one of them might be a match. If someone’s trying to get to you, I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “I don’t want you to worry about me. The nail technician said it was probably just one of the new hires playing a prank. I just thought you would want to know. Besides, how would anyone know where I was? The only people who knew where we were going and when were the people in my bridal party.”

  Russell was silent for a moment. When he spoke, she thought he sounded hesitant. “Maybe we were looking at this the wrong way. I was assuming that if my theory about you being the real target of the attack was true, then the attacker was trying to get to me through you. But what if it was someone whose sole target was you?” He paused, then reluctantly said, “What if it was someone in your bridal party?”

  Ellie laughed, then immediately felt bad about it. Russell was just worried about her. Women weren’t the only ones who dealt with stress right before a wedding, and Russell must have been feeling the same as she was. She knew as well as anyone that stress could make people think crazy things.

  “I don’t think anyone in my bridal party would want to kill me,” she said. “I mean, Shannon? Darlene? What could either of them possibly have against me? And I’ve known Katia and Rachel for years. I used to work with Katia, and Rachel lived in the apartment below me. Why would either of them want to see me dead? I can admit that my mother and I don’t have the best relationship, but I seriously doubt she has enough issues with me that she’d try to literally stab me in the back.”

  “I don’t think it’s your mother,” he said. “And of course, I didn’t mean Shannon might be a suspect. But think about it. If the two incidents are connected, then like you said, the women in your bridal party are the only ones who would know where you would be and when.”

  “They are staying with me in my house,” she pointed out. “If one of them did want me dead for some strange reason, then they would have had ampl
e chance to do it.”

  “If someone’s trying to sabotage you without getting caught, it makes more sense to do it in a public place, where strangers would be around to take the blame.”

  Ellie sighed. “I shouldn’t have mentioned anything. I don’t want you to worry about me.”

  “I always worry about you,” he said. “Just be careful, okay?”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open,” she promised. “And I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t forget about the rehearsal.”

  “How could I?” he asked, laughing. “Trust me when I say this wedding is the only thing I’ve been thinking about for the past week. I’ll be there, and everything will go perfectly — both during the rehearsal and the wedding itself.”

  Ellie didn’t have a chance to think about their conversation again until she was in bed that night. With the wedding just over twenty-four hours away, sleep seemed like an impossible task. As she tossed and turned, she thought about Russell’s suspicion. Was he making connections where there weren’t any? Normally she trusted his judgment, but she didn’t know if either of them had sound judgment about anything this close to their wedding. The fact that his first wife had been murdered didn’t help matters either; Russell had always been overly protective of her, and it had certainly gotten more noticeable as their wedding date drew closer. She knew that his protectiveness and concern weren’t without cause — she had certainly ended up in dangerous situations in the past.

  I don’t feel like I’m in danger, she thought. I trust all of the women who were with me on both days. None of them have a reason to want to see me dead, and none of them have acted less than encouraging about my wedding, besides my mother. No matter what issues existed between her and Donna, she couldn’t imagine her mother as a suspect.

  With a sigh, she turned over onto her side, being careful not to disturb Bunny, and gazed at the glowing numbers of the clock on her bedside table. She knew that she was going to be tired tomorrow, but she just couldn’t get to sleep. Not only was it her wedding rehearsal, but she was going to have lunch with her father — a man whom she hadn’t seen since he had walked out on her and her mother all those years before. What had she been thinking when she had invited him? The truth was, she hadn’t expected him to come. She had sent the invitation because it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but now she regretted it. She wanted to be surrounded by people who cared about her and Russell, and right now her father was all but a stranger to her. The occasional holiday card couldn’t make up for years of absence.

  A crashing sound from somewhere else in the house made her sit up straight in bed, yanking her thoughts away from the coming day. Her first thought was of her grandmother. The year before, Nonna had fallen down the basement stairs, and it had only been thanks to Bunny that Ellie had found her in time. If she had fallen again, then she would need help right away.

  Ellie jumped out of bed and hurried across the room, yanking open the door and stepping out into the hallway. She didn’t pause to turn on the lights as she raced down the stairs, though judging from the glow in the foyer, the lights were already on downstairs.

  She skidded to a halt at the bottom of the stairs when she saw that the glow wasn’t coming from the hallway light, but rather from the windows that looked out to the front yard and the driveway. Headlights. Someone was parked out front.

  Frowning, Ellie padded over to the window and pulled back the curtain just as the lights began to recede. Someone was backing out of the driveway, and it wasn’t a vehicle that she recognized. It was difficult to see in the dark, but there was enough moonlight that she could make out some sort of light colored pickup truck, bigger and newer than Russell’s. As she watched, it finished backing out of the driveway and sped off along the road away from town.

  The sound of broken glass falling onto a hard floor tore her gaze away from the window, and she continued through the house toward the kitchen. The kitchen lights were on, and on the floor, she found not her grandmother, but Rachel, kneeling on the floor as she mopped up champagne and shards of broken glass from a bottle that had been shattered on the floor.

  “What happened?” Ellie asked, grabbing a roll of paper towels and getting down on the floor to help her friend.

  “I don’t know. I had dozed off in the living room and heard the bottle break. I came in here to find it like this.”

  Puzzled, Ellie looked from the broken bottle of chilled champagne, to the door of the refrigerator, which was shut. There was no way the bottle could have found its way to the floor by itself. Was Rachel lying? Or had someone else been in her house?

  She stood up, dumping a wad of sodden paper towels into the garbage bin before making her way to the back door. It was unlocked. Feeling a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air, she flicked on the patio light and opened the door, but the snow was too trampled by the dogs, and she couldn’t tell if someone had been out there.

  “What is it?” Rachel asked.

  “There was someone parked in the driveway when I came downstairs. They pulled away as soon as I opened the curtain and looked out the window.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to think. I’m going to make sure everything is locked up, then I’ll come and finish cleaning this up. You go to bed.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  * * *

  At breakfast the next morning, Ellie asked if anyone knew what had happened to the champagne, but no one admitted to knowing anything. She hated the fact that she was looking at her friends and family as possible suspects, but either one of them was lying, or someone else had come into the house the night before to do nothing more than break a bottle of champagne and leave.

  Why would any of them lie about knocking the bottle over? She wondered. It was a mistake that anyone could have made if they had opened the fridge for a late-night snack. It didn’t make sense for any of them to hide it, but it made even less sense to think that someone would have driven all the way out there, found a way in, and then made a beeline to the fridge just to spill a drink.

  It was something that she wanted to call Russell about, but she didn’t have time to make the call just then. After breakfast, she loaded Sawyer and Bunny into her car along with their food, a crate for the puppy, and their favorite toys, and drove them toward town. The next two days were going to be hectic enough without a puppy underfoot, so finding a pet sitter for the dogs had seemed like the best option. When she and Russell left for their honeymoon next week, the dogs would be going back to the sitter for even longer, so this would be a good practice run.

  The new pet sitter was actually a friend of Iris’s, a young woman named Cassie who was working toward becoming a vet tech. When Ellie reached her house, it was a simple matter to carry the food, toys, and crate inside and hand the leashes over to Cassie, who both dogs seemed to take to immediately.

  “We’ll pick them up on Sunday,” Ellie said, crouching down to say goodbye to the dogs one last time. “If you need anything, don’t hesitate to call. I’m hoping they’ll be good for you.”

  “I’m sure they will be,” Cassie said. “I’ll take great care of them. You just focus on enjoying your wedding.”

  Even though she was getting married in less than a day, the wedding was the last thing on her mind as she drove away from Cassie’s house. She was supposed to meet her father for an early lunch in less than an hour and could think of nothing but what the meeting would entail. Taking a deep breath, and trying to keep the panic down, she turned into Papa Pacelli’s parking lot. She wasn’t supposed to work today, but she knew that she would be able to take comfort in the familiar surroundings. It wouldn’t hurt to stop in and see how things were going, and it would help to pass the time until the lunch that she was dreading.

  The employee entrance opened before she could reach it, and Pete, one of her delivery drivers, came out of the building laden with a pizza bag. He paused to hold the door open for her.

  “Hey, Ms. P. We weren’t expecting to see you today.�
��

  “I had some extra time on my hands,” she said. “I thought I’d stop in and say hi. How is everything going?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” he said. “I’ve got to make these deliveries before they get cold, though.”

  “Go on,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to keep the customers waiting.”

  The door shut behind her, cutting off the cold air from outside. The kitchen was warm, and smelled of dough, melted cheese, and freshly cut peppers. She inhaled deeply, already feeling calmer. The pizzeria was her second home, and it was a good reminder of everything that she had achieved. No matter how the lunch with her father went, it wouldn’t change anything. She would still have Russell, the pizzeria, and everything else that made her life worth living.

  The kitchen was empty, but not for long. The door that led to the dining area and the register swung open and Rose walked through, doing a double take when she saw Ellie standing by the stove.